Smart Goggles Identify, Remember What You See

The camera above the goggles is connected to a backpack computer system that records whatever you are looking at. The system also can be taught about particular items; it assigns a name to each object and then indexes the video footage so that every frame in which an object appears can be readily accessed.

High-speed image recognition processing is what does the trick; when the user asks to see footage related to a particular object, the corresponding video plays in a tiny LCD attached to the right lens.

The device could help elderly people with memory problems to lead a more independent life. It could also be used to sift through large amounts of video for particular objects (like looking through Youtube for every instance of someone with, say, a motorcycle).

This device cuts across a variety of cool sfnal devices. I thought about the True-Vu lenses from Brin's Earth right away, of course. But i also thought about Ava, the object recognition computer from The Calcutta Chromosome, a very clever 1995 novel by Amitav Ghosh. In the novel, Antar works for an artificial intelligence, a computer that needed human details about everything.

She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen… Once she'd wrung the last meaningless detail out of him, she'd give the object on her screen a final spin, with a bizarrely human smugness, before propelling it into horizonless limbo of her memory.
(Read more about Ava the curious AI)